Who's Fiddling While the Middle East Burns?

"...the conflagration both broke out and instantly became so fierce and so rapid from the wind that it seized in its grasp the entire length of the circus.."

Tacitus, Annals XV, 38

Who's Fiddling While the Middle East Burns?
Any chance for success in seeing a pro-Western Iraq government is lost each and every moment that the U.S. delays in playing a major part in stabilizing the region.

Watching Josh Bolten so easily eviscerated by Tim Russert on Meet the Press yesterday, the man Anonymoses has so craftily named "Mini-Dick" sounded more like a fiddler than a man who represents a leader with a plan.

Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is in Washington DC to "expose" Iran's leaning upon him to say those nasty things about America and Israel.

Those big bad Iranians are doing just what you'd expect them to do. They're pressing their advantage because the Shia street is ablaze with anger toward the U.S. and Israel. Just like the U.S., who has offered up thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of American casulaties, Iraq is hoping for as much influence in Iraq's politics as they can muster - off the backs of America's failure to win the political struggle once they'd removed Saddam Hussein from Iraq's helm.

From an op-ed by Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars:

[..]an American administration thought it could transform the Middle East overnight, using regime change in Iraq to jump start rapid democratization throughout the region. Instead, Washington's ideological hubris and practical incompetence have succeeded only in setting the region ablaze, awakening extremist and militant voices.[..]The toppling of Saddam Hussein was intended to send shock waves across the Arab world, intimidating the region's brittle tyrannies while encouraging the spontaneous civic movements that have brought democracy to much of post-Communist Europe. In Iraq itself, democrats were to replace a brutal autocrat, providing a model for the region.[..]Precisely the opposite has happened.

Of course, you cannot stabilize a region unless you know what you're doing there in the first place - and unless you fully understand the attitudes of the people and governments of the region. After hearing the evasive and cunning Dick-Cheney-like White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten on Meet the Press yesterday, I am not at all convinced that the Bush administration knows what they are getting themselves into. [Echoes of "we'll be greeted as liberators" still ring through our minds.]

I was concerned after reading Juan Cole's posting yesterday,

The chief outcome of the "war on terror" has been the proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel's assault on the very fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it and further that proliferation. Since asymmetrical challengers often turn to terrorism as a tactic, the "war on terror" has been, at the level of political society below that of high politics and the state, the most efficient engine for the production of terrorism in history.

To any moral human being, this is DREADFUL news - especially given the fact that Jan Egeland, the United Nations undersecretary general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said Sunday after touring South Beirut that most of the victims of Israel's attacks on Lebanon have been innocent civilians, and that children are dying.

We should be concerned about Professor Cole's comments regarding what was overheard as Bush chewed on his lunch and talked (with his mouth full) with UK PM Tony Blair last week. Bush clearly thinks that the war broke out because Syria used Hezbollah to create a provocation. It's far more complicated than that, as I'm sure you all already know. Professor Cole says it's "scary" to hear Bush say such things because the Israeli planning had to have been done in conjunction with Donald Rumsfeld at the US Department of Defense.

Let's heed Lawrence Kaplan's warning at TNR:

"...red lines have been drawn, whether the White House chooses to acknowledge them or not. With its own timetable for contesting Iran's nuclear ambitions--not to mention 130,000 U.S. troops fighting next door in Iraq--the administration has no appetite for a wider war. "If this escalates into open conflict between Iran and Israel," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, "America's goals in Iraq and its nuclear diplomacy at the U.N. will both go up in flames."

Bush cannot rely upon Israeli aggression alone for any form of success in Iraq. Kaplan suggests that the common American and Israeli goal seems to be the neutralization of Hezbollah (..although Joshua Bolten wouldn't admit it on Meet The Press on Sunday. Then again, he avoided admitting to just about everything with which he was confronted.)

Mr. Kaplan said:

the administration has given Israel the green light to "hit Hezbollah hard," in the words of a senior Israeli official. But, with one eye to the aftermath, the Bush team fears civilian casualties will amplify the chorus of international criticism, forcing a premature halt to the campaign and poisoning a post-conflict settlement. "Israel knows it can't dismantle Hezbollah from the air, and it knows the [Lebanese] government can't rein [Hezbollah] in," says a Pentagon official. "Everything you're seeing is about leverage for the end game." That end game, both the United States and Israel hope, will include European--and particularly French--political support for an effort to neutralize Hezbollah.

Hezbollah will not likely be neutralized anytime soon, but their violent tendencies may serve to cause the international community to marginalize them with the right showing of international force. If we are truly allies to Israel, the U.S. had best not unilaterally act like co-hooligans with them, but instead like a civilized nation of thinking gentlemen (and women).

Billmon speaks of the the flucht nach vorne --

the flight forward into even bigger follies.

Billmon says:

I'm disappointed to see that even Martin van Creveld, whose work I admire, has fallen prey to the comforting delusion that the situation can be salvaged with ever more destructive applications of firepower:

The problem in Lebanon is not Israel’s "excessive" use of violence. Quite the opposite, the real problem could be Israel’s extreme reluctance to use a sufficiently high level of force to solve this problem once and for all..

Dr. van Creveld, more than most, should understand where that logic ends in this kind of war: defeat or genocide. For some time now, one of my biggest fears has been that the neocons and their helpmates will finally drag America into a situation in the Midlde East where those are the only choices. The last twelve days seem to have taken us -- or at least our Middle East proxy -- another step in that direction.

In the Arab world, another major player in the worsening Middle East instability comes into play, and that is Syria. Here's a statement from Juan Cole on why the Bush administration's hopes of using the Israeli attempt to destroy Hezbollah as a wedge to convince Syria to give up rejectionism and detach itself from Iran are crazy. (my emphasis):

Syria is not going to give up its stance toward Israel unless it at the very least gets back the occupied Golan Heights. That is non-negotiable for Damascus. Since the Israeli Right is diehard opposed to making that deal, Israel will go on occupying part of Syrian soil. Syria cannot accept that outcome. Likewise, the Alawi regime in Syria faces a powerful challenge from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The high Baath officials would be afraid that if they made peace with Israel and got nothing out of it for Syria, there would be a mass popular Islamist uprising. A separate peace that leaves the Palestinians to the Israelis' tender mercies would also stick in the craw of the Syrian public. The administration plan will fail.

In Joseph Braude's latest TNR piece on Syria, he warns against a misreading (a la Michael Rubin/WSJ) of the feeling on the Arab street and in inter-Arab politics, making the point that Syria's refusal to comply with UN resolution 1559 has "long irked other Arab states":

I've been glued to Al Jazeera the past few days, and let me tell you, a large contingent of Arab nationalists and Sunni Islamists alike have no particular beef with Shiism lately. On the contrary, they fault Arab governments for shirking their duty to join Shia Hezbollah and Iran in fighting Israel. As the Lebanese death toll increases, this sentiment stands only to be solidified by the mass broadcast images of Arab blood. To insist that a bias against Shia power drives Arab leaders tacitly to support Israel is to impute a higher degree of sectarian chauvinism to Arab autocrats than one finds in their societies.

Note: I'm sure "the Arab street" won't be any happier to learn that Amnesty International is reporting that there've been "dozens of cases of individuals subjected to torture and ill-treatment in Jordan, ten of whom appear to be victims of the United States' renditions program."

Harold Myerson on what must be done to head off more needless death and destruction:

The remarks of Sharon's successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, scaling back Israel's goals from Hezbollah's destruction to the return of prisoners, the end of rocket attacks and the placement of Lebanese troops on the border, may signal a welcome descent from fantasy to reality in Israeli policy.[..]Real border security is going to require the kind of force that didn't exist as World War I loomed.[..]With the Lebanese army no match for Hezbollah, a genuine international army such as that proposed by Kofi Annan and Tony Blair (and bigger and more assertive than the Boy Scout troops that the United Nations periodically deploys) is needed to restore the peace. It offers no decisive outcome to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but no decisive outcome is remotely in the offing. [..] In a region rapidly succumbing to blood-drenched fantasies of victory or of martyrdom, however, an international holding action may be the only thing to spare us from another 1914.

What Neocons and Zarqawi Have in Common

What Neocons and Zarqawi Have in Common
They both would have loved the U.S. to make war on Iran

Juan Cole has something to say that I hope you will not miss. He says that the American hawks who've been connected with the Likud Party in Israel, such as Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin, who've been hoping and "trying to get up an American war on Iran, have turned out to have the same goal as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!

Professor Cole gives fair warning about the likelihood of an ugly outcome should the U.S. decide to do what the neocons and Zarqawi have wanted so badly:

It is the case that if you did want to see the US completely defeated and humiliated, you could not do better than have Washington open a second conventional front in Iran. Iran is much bigger than Iraq, more rugged in terrain, and 3 times more populous, and its population is politically savvy, literate and highly mobilized.

So, it doesn't matter whether you listen to Ledeen and Rubin on attacking Iran or to Zarqawi on the same subject. Either way, such a move spells disaster for the United States and should be opposed by genuine patriots who care about this country--until and unless Iran actually does something to the US that calls for a military response.

Plame leak - Niger Forgery - AIPAC Espionage - linked

Plame leak - Niger Forgery - AIPAC Espionage - linked
Even Bob Novak has a special place in this hellish tangled web.

With the knowledge that an unnamed recent appointee to the Bush administration was involved, even though not indicted in the AIPAC espionage case, I don't think we can state, with assuredness, that the Lawrence Franklin case wasn't all about the ugly production-line process by which US/Middle East policy has been created in Washington D.C. and, particularly in the Bush administration. Neocons, with their fevered verve to destabilize Iran, rolled over our CIA and chose to ally with non-American forces, namely Ahmad Chalabi's INC. The INC's lies and double-crossings have done irreparable damage to America. Judith Miller was smack dab in the middle of the neocon fever, and wittingly or not, she contributed to a great lie, perpetrated from within the White House, which has been one of the gravest insults and disservices to American citizens in the history of the United States.

The indictments?
Steve Rosen, former AIPAC policy director and Keith Weismann, an Iran analyst for AIPAC, were indicted and further criminal charges were brought against former Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency employee Larry Franklin, a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Rosen and Weismann were charged with illegally receiving classified material. Franklin was charged with illegally passing classified information to Rosen.

From JTA:

The indictment lists charges involving incidents dating back to 1999, four years before the AIPAC staffers met Franklin. The charges are related to information on Iran and terrorist attacks in central Asia and Saudi Arabia that was allegedly exchanged with three U.S. government officials and three staffers at Israel´s Embassy in Washington.

A source close to the defense said that one of the U.S. officials involved, who has not been indicted, was recently appointed to a senior Bush administration post. The source, who asked not to be identified, would not name the official.

Larry Franklin had been a mid-level civil service employee who'd worked for many years at the Defense Intelligence Agency and worked in OSP Douglas Feith's office (Feith was under secretary of defense for policy). In Feith's office, Franklin worked under William J. Luti, deputy undersecretary for defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, whose office was a part of the operation under Feith.

The recent indictment, for the first time, publically acknowledges the fact that Time magazine has previously reported, which is that Franklin had been enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted by the FBI) to get possible evidence on allies of Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neocons.

Chalabi was alleged to have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the US had broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S. support for Chalabi last spring --
and the FBI wanted to know who had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. -- An FBI counterintelligence investigation of who had leaked this information to Chalabi was reportedly under way by spring 2004, and many of Chalabi’s neocon allies were incredibly anxious: Misjudgment about Chalabi’s virtues or postwar Iraq planning was one thing; passing secrets to another nation would be an accusation of an altogether graver magnitude.[American Prospect - Laura Rozen/Jason Vest]

The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran.
What was in the draft that neocon Michael Rubin had written and Lawrence Franklin allegedly shared with AIPAC? [Rubin, by the way, was furious at the leak about the AIPAC espionage, saying that the White House "rewarded the June 15, 2003, FBI leak" by canceling consideration of the draft altogether].

There are speculations that the destabilization plan pushed by neocons were in the draft in question - and that it advocated that the US (or its "proxies") should arm the Iranian opposition, including the Kurds, as part of its efforts to pursue regime change.

There have also been alleged leaks from former U.S. diplomatic officials who have visited Iraq and told journalists that there are Israeli intelligence officials operating in Kurdish Iraq as political advisers, and others under the guise of businessmen. [source - American Prospect]

Visions of the ugly politics of the 1980s in Latin America resurface when we acknowlege what the neocons have been trying to do in Iraq, with an obvious nod from the White House:

The public statements by the neoconservatives emphasize that regime change in Iran would not require U.S. military force. Then again, the neoconservatives’ inspiration for the Iran plan has its roots in Reagan-era NSPDs that, while providing nonmilitary support to Poland’s Solidary Movement, also had the CIA aggressively arming and training the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, and other anti-communist rebels. There’s also no denying that some of the chief advocates of the Iran regime plot come out of the Pentagon, America’s military command center. And some of those same Iran hawks have discussed the Iran regime-change issue, for instance, with Parisian-based Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- not exactly the kind of go-to guy for a nonviolent regime change plan, one might think.

THE NIGER FORGERY LINK

Franklin also participated in secret meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms dealer who acted as a middleman in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. The secret meetings, first held in Rome in December 2001, were brokered by Michael Ledeen, a leading neocon and long-time supporter of Israel. Ledeen said he arranged the meetings to put the Bush administration in closer contact with Iranian dissidents who could provide information on the war on terrorism. But he said that Franklin was always skeptical about the usefulness of the back-channel meetings. LINK - WRMEA

Bob Novak spilled classified information here:

From A Daily Kos diary entry:

Bob Novak's greatest harm to national security didn't come from outing Valerie Plame and her front company. His greatest harm came when he made the following statement in his July 14, 2003 article:

Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

Up until that time, the name of the country involved was classified. Check out EmptyWheels great diary...How could Novak have known SISMI was involved? Either someone with clearance told him, or a conspirator to the forgeries told him. Who would those conspirators be? Those with links to P-2 and the parallel Italian intelligence network. I think I've pretty much spelled out who's on that list.

WHICH BRINGS IT ALL DOWN TO THE OUTING OF VALERIE PLAME

Why? Because her husband was getting too close to the truth.

It isn't hard to see how are these cases are related.

My question is this - and this is only speculation. When embedded in Iraq, it's been reported that Judith Miller used to throw Douglas Feith's name (and negative press) around as a threat to hang over the Military's heads (to get them to do what she wanted). It's clear she was a close contact of Feith's (and Franklin's) office. It is said that there are clues about who it was in the news media whom AIPAC used to "launder" classified information after AIPAC acquired it from recently-indicted Larry Franklin. An article says:

Rosen and Weissman disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 on a variety of topics that included terrorist activities in Central Asia, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaida and US policy in Iran, the indictment said. Among their contacts were foreign government officials and reporters..

The FBI doesn't offer names of media sources, but it does provide dates and specific themes of stories. It is probably worth investigating.

Related: see Juan Cole's notes from a year ago.

Headlines


The Nation- The Empire Backfires by Jonathan Schell

NY Times - The Mercury Scandal by Paul Krugman

United Press International - Medical evacuations in Iraq war hit 18,000 by Mark Benjamin

Eric Margolis- Bush And The Uzbek Communists; Uzbekistan plays a key role in White House plans; Bush cites Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms while ignoring the horrors in Uzbekistan.

Globe and Mail- Uzbekistan: Terrorism's Next Big Trigger by Nicole Jackson

Washington Post- ..What is so perturbing about this administration is not that no one of note has resigned or been fired -- and some of them certainty deserve the ax -- but that there is not the slightest hint that anyone (except Colin Powell) appreciates that mistakes were made not out of sheer bad luck but because the assumptions, driven by ideology, were so bad.- Richard Cohen

The Oregonian - Nader fails to qualify for the Oregon ballot-by Jeff Mapes

CNN - Kerry to campaign in Ohio: Bush should be 'less ideological and more practical'

AOL News - Poll Says Bush Is Losing Support on Iraq: Public approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq has slipped to a new low - alongside his overall job rating - after last week's grisly deaths of four contractors in Fallujah, a poll says by Will Lester

Boston Globe - Kennedy likens Bush to Nixon: 'Credibility gap' is called largest since Watergate by Thomas Ferraro

AP: Howard Dean quote: "The only way to send President Bush back to Crawford, Texas, is to vote for John Kerry because, unfortunately, a vote for Ralph Nader is the same as a vote for George Bush."

USA Today: Nine-term congressman Amo Houghton [(R)-Upstate NY] to retire. Houghton quote: "I would like to make sure the Republican Party is centered. We veered too much to the right. We've always had this problem."

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Iraq, 'the War on Terror' and the 9/11 commission


Toronto Star: An overwhelming U.S. "pacification" of Fallujah will only make future Al Qaeda recruitment drives easier.

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NY Times - Kufa: An Incendiary Cleric Braces His Militia for an Invasion by Jeffrey Gettleman

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CAP: Detailed Timeline of Administration Statements On National Security [pdf]
*From January 20 to September 10, 2001, Al Qaeda Mentioned Only Once*

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CAP: 9-11- Something to Hide

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The Future of Freedom Foundation - Resisting the Occupation (“Liberation”) of Iraq by Jacob G. Hornberger

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Washington Post: Rule of Law In Iraq- Justice inaction emboldens the insurgents, who know that unless they are killed while being apprehended, the worst that will happen to them is detention, which demoralizes law-abiding Iraqis. - By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

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BBC News - Heavy fighting in sealed Falluja

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San Diego.com: Mistake in Iraq hard to correct- Under Bush, we are to Iraq as B'rer Rabbit is to the Tar Baby.

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Guerrilla News Network - Guerrilla of the Week: Raed Jarrar, The Baghdad blogger who warned this day would come

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*The sky may not be falling, but the Shia are rising up furiously*
National Review - Sadr Signs: The sky is not falling by Michael Rubin

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BBC News - US considers Iraq reinforcements

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American Prospect - Collateral Damage: Why the real harm done by Bush's Iraq policy is found in Afghanistan by Matthew Yglesias

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BBC News - Chemical 'bomb plot' in UK foiled

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*The writer fails to talk about America's complicity (direct or indirect) in creating a great many of the mass graves.*
The Weekly Standard - Bodies of Evidence: Mass graves will show that the United States was justified in liberating Iraq by Terry Eastland

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Other Articles


NY Times: Sharon Hints He Has Dropped Vow Not to Harm Arafat

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ENN News - Federal plan announces transportation of nation's nuclear waste across New Mexico by rail

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The American Conservative - Suicide by Free Trade by Pat Buchanan

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